The Debt He Owes
by Ava Blook
Summary: Joey Drew Studios has fallen into deep debt, and Larry Bower is the collections agent assigned to make Mr. Drew pay up. Of course, that goes about as well as you'd imagine. AKA How Joey Drew made the first Searcher.
1. Collection

**Yep, more Bendy fic. Once I started, I couldn't stop, haha.**

 **Larry Bower is my OC, there's no reference to him in the game, but I figured at some point someone had to try to squeeze some money out of this failing studio.**

 **UPDATED 5/24/2018**

* * *

It was Larry Bower's first trip out on his own. After months of supervising more experienced people on the job, and then being supervised by them, he was finally out on his own. Of course, he was a newbie, so he was starting at the bottom of the pyramid, doing the work no one else wanted to.

Larry was a collections officer, and Joey Drew Studios was one client his boss doubted would ever pay up.

They'd been calling twice daily, and then half a dozen times a day, until the public phone number disconnected. They'd been sending letters for months now, enough that his boss had once joked that they'd spent more on paper than they'd ever get out of the studio. Finally, they'd decided they could spare a rookie to try and lean on the studio a little harder.

So of course, it got passed to Larry, and now he was standing outside the front door of Joey Drew Studios, trying to work up the nerve to knock.

He'd seen their cartoons; pretty much everyone had. They'd gotten a laugh out of him, for sure, even if the quality had been going downhill for the past few years. At this point, his boss was sure Joey Drew was using the studio as a front while he pocketed most of the money—there was no way an animation studio spent as much as Joey Drew Studios did on animation and had cartoons come out months after the advertised release date and with stiff, jittery animation.

No big deal, though, Larry tried to convince himself. Almost every business owner the collections officer had dealt with had been doing something shady if not downright illegal with the money they owed. Joey Drew was no different.

Larry squared his shoulders and knocked on the door.

"Ruthford Collections Agency!" he called.

He could hear scurrying behind the door, and then a frazzled-looking young man wearing a shirt stained with ink opened it for him.

"Here to see Joey?" he asked. Larry nodded, startled by the man's appearance. He could understand getting ink on your clothes if you worked with it all day, but this man looked like he'd had a bucket of the stuff dumped on him.

Still, he let Larry inside, which was more than he'd been expecting. A narrow hallway plastered with posters for Bendy cartoons opened into a larger room, with machinery whirring on the walls and a projector showing off rough animation that a couple people were murmuring over. There was an animator frantically working at a desk haphazardly placed in one corner, as if whoever was in charge of laying out the desks had run out of room elsewhere.

"You okay waiting in the break room? I'll have someone find Joey and send him over," the animator asked.

"Oh, uh, sure," Larry said. "I can wait for him."

"Great," the man said, taking Larry down a somewhat twisty path into the studio. He opened a door near the end of a hall and gestured down the stairs. Larry got a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach, but he wasn't sure if it was from the fact he was being ushered into a basement or from the simply awful grinding noises coming around the corner to the left of the break room door.

Still, this was his job. He didn't have much choice.

Larry began descending the stairs, and the animator headed on his way.

"Franks!" the animator screamed.

"What?" came a muffled shout from down the hall.

"Find Joey and send him to the break room!"

"That's not my job!"

"Well it's sure as fuck not my job either, and _I've_ got a deadline!"

There were a couple other people in the breakroom, thankfully. One man slouched over in his chair, smoking a cigarette and scowling, while another stood near the wall doing some odd stretches with his arms. Both barely spared Larry a glance, keeping their eyes on the clock. Larry noticed a shiny new punchcard machine near the bottom of the stairs, with a poster encouraging employees to punch in. It seemed that Joey was quite demanding of his employees' time, so it didn't make much sense that the studio was in such bad shape for its budget—unless Mr. Drew was spending more on punchcard machines and similar waste than on his employees. How he ever expected to turn a profit like that, Larry didn't know.

It took a while for Mr. Drew to show up. The stretching animator punched back in and returned to work, and the smoker started up a new cigarette and put the old one out. He started scribbling at a piece of scrap paper, nonsense gibberish Larry couldn't quite make out. He began to wonder if that Franks fellow, or anyone else, was even looking for Joey Drew at all.

Finally, when the smoking man had finally gathered his papers and stormed out, Joey Drew showed up at the top of the stairs. He seemed confident, put together, and he wasn't short of breath—Larry fumed a little internally that he'd been kept waiting longer than necessary—yet his suit was rumpled and the sleeves were stained with ink up to his elbows as if he'd dipped his arms partway into a vat of the stuff. Larry wasn't quite sure what he had been expecting from the man, but this wasn't it.

"Sorry for the delay!" Mr. Drew boomed in a deep, loud voice—a showman's voice, for sure. "Ran into a few problems on the way, you know how it is when you're running your own company! Well, maybe you don't, but I'm sure you can imagine it's incredibly busy!"

Larry pushed himself out of his seat and made for the stairs. He felt nervous to have the man he was supposed to be putting pressure on towering over him at the top of the stairs, but as he came to the top he saw why; Joey Drew was on crutches, and obviously favoring one leg over the other. Health issues, one of the more common reasons to funnel money out of a business, and Larry had seen it half a dozen times at least. Still, he felt a little sorry for the man; Joey winced when he shifted his weight to free one hand for a handshake, and yet he was still on the premises, doing his job.

"Perfectly understandable," Larry said. "I'm Larry Bower, from Ruthford Collections Agency. You're Mr. Joey Drew, I trust?"

Mr. Drew's face paled a bit at that, but he nodded.

"That's me, all right," he said. "I imagine you're here to try collecting on some of the company's debts?"

"That's correct," Larry said, slipping into a more cool and collected persona. "Mr. Drew, my company has been sending requests for collection for over six months now, but we haven't heard from anyone at your company."

"Ah yes, well, paper letters don't tend to last long around here," Joey said. "There's all the ink, and it's only so long we can go without any of it spilling on them, you know."

"So you acknowledge you've been receiving the letters?"

"Well, yes, but they're usually illegible by the time I see them personally."

"And you didn't hire a secretary or mail handler to ensure that didn't happen?"

"We're in enough debt as it is without hiring another employee! We've had to cut a lot of costs lately, you know."

"Like your phone service?"

Joey's face paled again, and he shifted his weight and readjusted his crutches.

"That's the least of it, I'm afraid," he said. "But! I do believe we're on the edge of a breakthrough! Within the year, Joey Drew Studios is going to be back on top again, with cartoons like no one has ever seen before. Faster releases! Higher-quality animation than ever! So, with that in mind, I do think I will be able to write your company a check today. Not for all I owe you, of course, but a good chunk of it."

Larry didn't really know what to say to that, and he was fairly certain his surprise was showing on his face. No one, _no one_ , had thought Joey Drew Studios would ever so much as pay its interest, and here Joey Drew himself was offering to write a check!

Joey laughed.

"Don't look so startled, boy! Half the trouble your company has had with me has been miscommunication! Now, I just need to fetch my checkbook. Care to come with me?"

Larry nodded, not quite trusting his own voice. If he missed this chance to get a payment out of Joey Drew, there was no way his boss would ever let him hear the end of it.

And of course, if he got the payment, he might even get a promotion. This was a nightmare account, and Larry was handling it like a pro!

Larry followed Joey as he made his way down the hall, back through the main room and down a hallway on the other side. They turned and took a set of stairs across from an old, abandoned desk covered in cobwebs and sheets of rough paper, and it seemed Joey wasn't kidding about needing to cut more than the phone if they'd fired an animator to make ends meet.

"Ah, that was Henry's desk," Joey reminisced. "He was one of our best animators, kept the whole department in line, you know. But when the money got tight, we couldn't afford to keep him around. I keep hoping he'll come back one day, and leave his desk; I've become something of a sentimental old man, I'm afraid."

Larry tried to catch Joey's face, because it almost sounded like the man was about to cry, but Mr. Drew's back was to him, pointedly looking at the stairs. After a moment, he ventured forward and started climbing them, an awkward affair with his crutches, as if nothing had happened.

Larry followed a few steps behind, wondering if he should be ready to catch the man if he tumbled backwards. If was hard to reconcile that the stubborn, extravagant Joey Drew was a man getting on in years who couldn't even walk without crutches. Why had it taken the agency so long to send someone out here and get this whole mess cleaned up?

They reached the second story, and Mr. Drew paused at the beginning of a long hallway.

"My office is on this floor, but it's a bit of a maze, I'm afraid. You don't mind following, I assume?" he asked.

"Of course not, sir," Larry answered, and Joey took off down what very much resembled an actual maze, hallways splitting and twisting. The building hadn't seemed as big on the outside as it was on the inside, and Larry hoped Mr. Drew would lead him back out again, because he was hopelessly lost.

"Just through here," Joey said, pushing open a seemingly random door, and Larry found himself on a catwalk overhanging an enormous machine suspended from the ceiling by chains. He couldn't help but gawk at the sheer size of it – it had to be taller than a person, and weigh thousands of pounds. An enormous, open vat of ink bigger than a bathtub standing on one end was hooked to one end, and the other dripped traces of ink into a bucket suspended above a deep pit in the wooden floor below.

This was where all the money went. It _had_ to be. But what did an animation studio need with a machine like this?

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Joey asked, his voice momentarily tender. "This is the big project we've been trying to keep secret for a while now; the Ink Machine. It supplies all the ink the animators need, directly to their desks! And it does a few other things, too, but we have to keep some secrets around here!" Joey chortled, even though Larry didn't think he'd said anything funny, and then his tone grew serious.

"With this Ink Machine, we're going to revolutionize the animation industry - hell, the whole world!"

Larry took another look at the machine, this time doubtful. Sure, it was impressively big, but what use did it serve outside of animation? How many other industries needed ink delivered throughout a building so often?

"Take a closer look if you want, it's perfectly safe turned off like this," Joey said, gesturing for Larry to look closer. He decided it couldn't hurt, worst he'd do was stain his shirt, so he leaned over the railing a bit to look.

"If you look into the ink supply, you'll see what makes this machine so revolutionary. Think you can guess?" Joey asked playfully, like some of Larry's seniors at work when they were showing off new cars. Larry decided to humor him, trying to look at what lay in the ink tank, but he couldn't see anything past the solid black surface of the ink.

"I don't know, Mister Drew," Larry said. "It's hard to see with all the—"

But before he could finish his sentence, Joey lunged forward, all traces of limp and joint pain gone. He grabbed the belt of Larry's pants and, with surprising strength, tipped him over the railing of the catwalk, into the ink.

At first, all Larry could feel was how thick it was; thicker than any liquid he could think of. Maybe quicksand could compare, he thought vaguely as he tried to kick and claw his way to the surface to take a breath, only to get sucked deeper in. But with every passing moment, it pressed on him more, and he could feel the cold. It wasn't like ice, wasn't chilly or freezing; it was cold because it was sapping the warmth out of his body, swiftly and surely. Larry raised a hand for the surface, thought he felt air against ink-covered fingers…

* * *

Up on the catwalk, Joey winced as the gears snagged on Larry's body and struggled for a moment. They were built to work through thick chunks of pigment and goo, not human bones and organs, but after a little whirring and grinding, the Machine seemed to find its stride, and it worked through Larry's body in no time, spitting out a thick and gooey glob of ink before returning to gushing the normal liquid ink.

Joey flipped the emergency stop back off. It was regrettable, killing the man, but he couldn't have the studio collapse because of monetary debt of all things. Not when they were so close to success, to _immortality_.

At least he'd had time to disconnect the machine from the main pipe system. Saved Wally having to fix a clogged pipe later on, which could easily be a day or more of work for the man. He really should consider firing him... but no, he couldn't risk him spreading the Studio's secrets.

Joey climbed down the service ladder to the level of the machine and set about reconnecting the outflow pipes that supplied the studio.

As he worked, the thick bucket of ink that held Larry's earthly remains bubbled. Then it writhed. Finally, a shape broke the surface of the ink, a surprisingly human hand, and slapped onto the floor. Joey dropped the wrench he was holding at the sudden noise, and turned in awe to watch as another hand emerged, then arms, pulling up a torso and a head with a familiar face

"-ink," Larry finished saying, before he seemed to realize the change in surroundings.

First he looked up, at Joey himself. Then down, at the floor, and then at the base of his own body, which seemed to stop and melt into the inky contents of the bucket at his waist. He held his hands out in front of himself, flipping them over time and time again as ink started to drip and splatter off of them.

"No, no, no, what happened, what happened!" he muttered, flying into hysteria as the ink making up his body lost its solidity, started dripping. But Larry didn't dissolve into a puddle.

Joey watched, stock-still, his face unreadable. It wasn't anywhere near perfection, but it was an enormous improvement over his previous experiments with the machine.

"Larry, I do believe you've just solved an enormous problem we were having here at the studio," Joey said, an unsettlingly wide grin spreading across his face.

What was that saying, about two birds and one stone?


	2. Exploration

**Sorry for the delay on this chapter! Hope you enjoy it!  
** **UPDATED 5/24/2018**

* * *

Joey Drew Studios went deeper than Larry ever could have imagined—deeper than he thought possible, even. It had a modest two stories above ground, but basement under basement under basement, tunneling hundreds of feet down into the ground with toy factories and other attractions the public would likely never descend to see.

And the ink was everywhere. Pipes for the Ink Machine snaked and tangled through the whole building, and the lowermost levels wound up drenched in the ink dripping from the dozens of floors above.

And here Larry had thought Joey had been pocketing the ridiculous amounts of cash the Studio spent. All the out-of-place construction and machinery debts that had seemed like fraud made perfect sense once Larry saw the ink-drenched labyrinth the Studio had become.

Not that he'd seen very much of it. Joey had been quick to scoop him into the bucket and hurry him down the stairs to one of the lowest levels of the basement before anyone could see him. He'd shut Larry into what was probably a storage room, half the room full of wobbly chairs, empty inkwells, and one drum with a rip in the side.

Mr. Drew had come back a few times since then, asking Larry questions and using a syringe to take samples of the ink that made up his body now. He never made conversation, though, and Larry saw what he was like underneath the cheery facade he had put on to lure Larry to his death. The man was ruthless, relentless in pursuit of his goals. He refused to let anything stand in his way: the law, other people's lives, the rules of reality itself. When Larry heard what Joey was planning, he figured he would have once called the man insane—bringing cartoons to the real world? That was impossible!

But look what the man had already done to Larry himself. Joey Drew's wild dream was closer to being a reality than he even knew.

The lights for the basement floors had gone out with the rest a little while ago - it was so hard to keep track of time around here, except to know when the Studio was open or closed, and right now it was closed.

And the lights didn't go out until everyone, Joey included, had left the building.

In the cover of darkness, Larry took a deep breath he didn't really need anymore and started melting.

His legs went first, as always. No matter how detailed he could get the rest of him, sometimes so close to human he could convince himself his body was there under the ink, his legs were the hardest part, and rarely more than lanky, dripping sticks with a simple knee joint, and they melted into a puddle with the slightest lapse in concentration. The rest of him went slower, thicker ink melting down in clumps to join the other ink puddled on the wooden floor. Finally, his head.

As always, there was a moment where Larry lost himself in the vast, empty void of the ink, his mind spreading in tiny pieces across the Studio, from the pipes in the music department to the inkwells in animation to the horrible vat attached to the Ink Machine.

But none of that ink was _his_ , not in the same way his new body, thick with chunks of his old one, was. Using its gentle pull as a beacon, Larry gathered his scattered consciousness back to the thick puddle in the bottommost basement and started to move.

The storage closet would have been a fine prison for a still-human Larry, and it might even have worked for a Larry as solid as Mr. Drew thought he was. But, as Larry had found out and promptly kept secret, his ink was almost as liquid as any the animators used, and the storage closet had a gap of almost an inch between the floor and the bottom of the door. That gap was Larry's last hope for sanity; shut away in a tiny room, he knew he'd go mad sooner or later, but at least by sneaking through that gap, he could venture out into other parts of the Studio when no one else was around.

He'd considered making a break for it, of course, to leave the Studio. The problem was that no matter how detailed he could get his body, it was always the same glistening, deep black, with drips and ripples. There was no way he could even hope to pass for human, to go back to his old life. The best he could hope for on the outside would be experimentation in some kind of secret government lab, no better than how Joey treated him here.

He'd also considered at least calling the collections agency, to warn them not to try coming to the Studio again, but that would only have people knowing he was alive, and Joey knowing he could get out. He'd just have to hope that his sudden disappearance was warning enough and that the agency backed off.

There was nothing Larry could do to escape the Studio, or warn the other agents. During his brief escapes from the storage room, he would just wander the halls of the studio and try to find ways to occupy himself, looking over drawings and listening to the tape recordings the employees left during the day. He'd grown quite fond of the janitor, Wally Franks, despite never having met the man. He had a personality that could liven up even the most boring of Larry's aimless wanderings.

So Larry didn't really have any expectations for this night, though he was still startled when the operating lights for the stairwell clicked on, flooding the floor with half-light that was blinding after the darkness. Larry froze as he waited for Joey to storm the room and find him here, outside his prison, and shut him away somewhere airtight for God-knows-how-long.

But after a few moments, when Joey failed to appear and Larry didn't hear footsteps on the stairs, he figured it was a false alarm. The lights for the entire stairwell were controlled by a single switch, and most likely someone was on one of the upper floors; maybe an employee had forgotten a belonging or wanted to get extra work done.

Still, it wouldn't do him any favors to risk being found out. Cutting this trip short might be disappointing, but if it meant he'd be able to get out again in the future, he'd make that sacrifice. Larry turned to make his way back to his closet only to find that his legs had melted down into a puddle in his surprise at the lights coming on.

Well, he'd just deal with that later. Larry began pulling his torso across the room, back to the storage closet, and the puddled ink trailed behind him, leaving only the slightest trace of streaking on the floor. No one would notice it here, where the ink pipes burst and flooded the room regularly, he was sure.

It was humiliating, crawling across the floor like this, another reminder of everything that Joey Drew had stolen from him by putting him through the Machine. Not just his humanity, his life (in more way than one), but his very dignity, the legs underneath him. Larry had never considered himself a vengeful man, but he would make an exception for Mr. Drew, given the chance. To force that man to crawl because his legs were useless, unable to be trusted… just the thought of it brought a smile to Larry's face.

But he wasn't in a position to do such things at the moment. No, for now he needed to hide, to play at being docile, to wait for his opportunity to strike back. And so Larry slunk back to the storage room, reaching the door just as the lights flickered and a horrible scream came from above.

That didn't sound like an employee here to pick up a forgotten item. It sounded like… well, it almost sounded like a reaction to what Joey had done to him, if Larry had been able to scream as the Machine crushed his legs, if he hadn't been drowning in the ink.

Larry quickly let go of his solid form, slipping into a thick puddle to slide underneath the door. As usual, there was a moment where his mind melted as well, spreading out across all the ink of the studio.

This time, he found another mind there, waiting.

Curious, Larry poked at the other mind, as best as one intangible collection of thoughts could poke another. The other mind seemed familiar to him, though he wasn't sure in what way. Mostly, the other was confused, quickly sliding out of its tightly-pressed near-human density to slip out into the surrounding ink.

Through the ink in the room, in the pipes and spread across the floor, Larry could feel Joey's presence, malicious and moving, swiftly scooping up the new mind into a bucket and heading for the stairs.

The stairs to the basement, where Larry's body proper was still puddled on the floor. Larry quickly collected himself back into his own ink, sliding under the door and reforming his torso the way Joey had come to expect seeing it. He assumed a hunched pose, head bowed in apparent despair, as he heard Joey's footsteps clunking down the stairs.

Joey barely fiddled with the lock to the storage closet before flinging open the door, a wild look in his eyes and his lips pulled back from his teeth in such a way that Larry couldn't decide if it was a smile or a scowl. He threw the bucket he was carrying into the room with such force it hit the back wall with a loud clunk and then rebounded to the floor, rolling on its side in a circle. Then he shook his head, forcing a smile, though his eyes didn't calm any.

"Seems I'm not as close as I thought, Larry. Your friend here's no more a toon than you are. Any idea why that is?"

Larry stayed quiet, torn between snarking back at Mr. Drew and processing what he'd just said. 'Your friend'… who exactly was in the bucket? Larry couldn't bring himself to look.

Joey scoffed.

"Of course you don't know. You had such a small mind, such small goals. Money? Ha! Who cares about money, with the kind of revolution I'm going to bring to the world. I _will_ perfect the process, no matter how long it takes, mark my words."

And with that, he slammed the door to the room shut, leaving Larry and his new companion in the dark again.

* * *

It took the newcomer some time to collect themself from the ink, piecing the scattered bits of their mind into a whole. Larry tried to help herd them back together, but even so, it was a few days before they were fully coherent again.

And no wonder Larry had thought them familiar—the newcomer turned out to be David Parson, his coworker from the collections agency. Even after Larry had disappeared on the premises, the agency had sent another agent to try collecting Joey's debt.

Larry felt pretty terrible for David; the man was ten years older than him, with a wife and a young child at home. Larry hadn't left anyone of importance behind, but David had, and the desire to return to them burned at him like hot oil, Larry could tell.

David explained that while he'd come during work hours, Joey hadn't dumped him into the machine straightaway, but forced him to write a letter to the agency, urging them to stop trying to collect, which he'd gone to deliver after the Studio closed for the day. Only once the employees had left had he returned, freeing David from the closet where he'd been bound and gagged to paint some strange symbols onto his skin and put him through the Ink Machine.

The mention of the symbols caught Larry's attention—after all, Joey had gone to no such lengths when he'd put Larry through the Machine. Then again, Joey hadn't been expecting Larry to come out the other side of it, either, while that seemed to be his intention for David.

Perhaps a bit rudely, Larry had pressed David for details of the symbols, which were nonsense when David drew them out on the floor in the ink of his own body as best he remembered them.

"He kept checking back to this weird book," David said. "I saw one of the pages, and it had some of these symbols, but with a bunch of normal words underneath, and they said something about shaping the form? I didn't get a good look, but it was like some kinda magic spell nonsense."

"Maybe not as nonsensical as you'd think," Larry said. "Look at the state of us, after all. It'd make sense if _something_ supernatural's going on in this Studio, and if that book's got the explanations… Well, maybe we could do a little magic of our own."

"Get our bodies back," David said. "Get out of this place, warn people, call the cops or somethin'."

"Exactly," Larry said, smiling. "And finally give that Joey Drew exactly what he deserves."

Searching for the book became their goal, their hope for salvation. David managed to sneak out a note to his family, asking for help, but nothing had ever come of it. The Agency never sent the police to the Studio to investigate their disappearances, either. The book was their best, and only, chance of escape.

Larry showed David how to escape the storage room, how to puddle underneath the door and collect his mind afterward. The two of them made their way through the Studio with purpose on unsteady legs, hunting through every corner and hidden spot they could reach looking for the book.

They spent weeks trying to break into the locked room in the music department, sure something so secure would be holding something as precious as the book, only to find soup and a few scattered sheets of music spread across a stray desk. They wandered the halls, creeping their way up the stairs as they cleared every inch of the lower floors, making their way up towards the surface, towards Joey.

It was slow going, and absolutely disheartening every time they turned a floor top to bottom and found no trace of the book. Worse still was when Joey started up the Ink Machine again, and a new mind joined them in the ink.

The plane of his mind that Larry had once thought was infinite was quickly getting more crowded, the minds of the new arrivals bumping into each other without meaning to, unable to help it. Their minds turned liquid when their bodies did, and spread out so easily, even when those more established tried to help them. It was becoming trickier to keep everyone separate and distinct these days.

But they had made their way up to the floors that were inhabited, where Joey and the animators spent their days. The book _had_ to be here, in Joey's office, maybe, or in the Ink Machine room.

They would find it, soon. They would find it, and its contents would tell them how to undo what had been done to them. They'd rebuild their bodies, return to the world outside. They'd be able to see the sunlight and feel the breeze against their skin. There would be no more hiding in dark corners, melted and spread into puddles to avoid attracting attention.

And then Joey, and all the other employees who had let this happen under their noses, would _pay_.


End file.
